Wednesday, June 27, 2007

New lease of life for the Dead Sea?

See the sliver of greenish-blueish water poking up at the bottom of this image? That's the Dead Sea, and at the top of the picture (actually the south) is the Red Sea. As you may know, the Dead Sea has been dropping by 1 metre a year for the past two decades because of evaporation and reservoirs that deplete the Jordan River, its only inlet. Many claim the situation is an environmental disaster. The solution? A canal: a Red-Dead canal. You can see from the picture it's a fairly obvious solution.

In fact, the proposed canal would lie along a geological faultline called the Dead Sea Rift - part of the Great Rift Valley which continues into Africa. Around 3 million years ago the rift was often inundated with water from the Red Sea - a new canal would perhaps lie along an ancient river channel.

The proposal, as it turns out, has been around since 1855. At the time, Admiral William Allen, a British naval officer, suggested it as an alternative route to the Suez Canal (and if anyone can explain to me how this makes any sense, please let me know). The suggestion later went through several incarnations, which you can read about on Wikipedia here and here. One alternative proposal was to link the Dead sea to the Mediterranean in the north (bottom, right of the picture) - a shorter route.

Then, in December 2006, Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority agreed to launch a feasibility study for the Red-Dead project. It'll take 25 years to complete and would not only replenish the Dead Sea (although some environmentalists are concerned that because of its different chemistry, the Red Sea water will do more harm to the area than good), it could also be coupled to desalination plants that would bring much-needed drinking and irrigation water to the region, and could power hydroelectric dams to boot. And the beauty of it all is that the canal would simply flow down-hill: the Dead Sea is possibly the lowest point on Earth, at 420 metres below sea-level.

Yesterday, Jordan's ministry of water and irrigation invited 11 companies to bid for the commission to carry out the feasibility study, which will be managed by the World Bank. France, the Netherlands, Japan and the US have so far committed $9 million to the study. Watch this space!

As of all the possible routes for such a canal this is the dumbest of them. It will waste away whatever is left in the beauty of the Red Sea. The original route is the best from Haifa to Bet Shean and feeding the dried up Jordan River.

Weren't they going to run it thru Israel and put a power station at the end,before the seawater dropped into the Dead Sea?They reckoned it'd be feasible because of the time it would take to fill.[I think they said about 15 years]